Abstract
The Marian writings of the Roman poet Vittoria Colonna (1490/92–1547), the Venetian polemicist Lucrezia Marinella (1579–1653),1 and the Florentine educator Eleonora Montalvo (1602–1659) present an accessible model of the Virgin Mary in the early modern period that both lay and religious women could emulate in order to strengthen their individual spirituality. While the Catholic Church encouraged women to accept and imitate an ideal of the Virgin Mary’s character traits and behavior for the good of society, these three women writers constructed a more fruitful narrative of the Virgin’s life and experience that included elements and imagery that would empower women to enhance their personal practice of meditation.
Highlights
The Marian writings of the Roman poet Vittoria Colonna (1490/92-1547), the Venetian polemicist Lucrezia Marinella (1579–1653)1, and the Florentine educator Eleonora Montalvo (1602–1659) present an accessible model of the Virgin Mary in the early modern period that both lay and religious women could emulate in order to strengthen their individual spirituality
In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Christian Europe, ecclesiastical leaders disagreed on the power of the Virgin Mary to effectuate salvation: Catholics promoted Mary’s intercessory role, whereas Protestants considered it heresy to pray to the Virgin, choosing instead to focus on Mary’s position as a recipient of God’s grace, a mortal woman full of faith and worthy of emulation (Bruni and Wirz 2012; Gambero 2012)
In an advanced-level undergraduate senior seminar on Early Modern Italian Women Writers, my goal as a teacher is to outline the expectations that men placed on women while encouraging students to identify and appreciate the unique ways in which women writers—and not just nuns who wrote on spiritual matters, but laywomen as well—sought to create their own template of the ideal spiritual woman
Summary
One of the first points I make with my students about the model of a “well-behaved Mary” is that art was a powerful force in shaping it. Bernardino’s preaching in fifteenth-century Siena when he comments on Mary’s behavioral traits He encourages women and girls to stay at home, as the Virgin did, and never at the window, but shut away in their rooms instead reading pious material:. Marinella presents Mary as she is often depicted in early modern paintings, engaging in sophisticated needlework that was typical of the upper classes, in contrast to the fourteenth-century pseudo-Bonaventuran representation of the Virgin Mary who performs basic and essential sewing and spinning to help provide for her family’s needs in Egypt As we read these excerpts from Marinella’s La vita di Maria Vergine, my students and I consider the following questions: Why does Marinella’s text reinforce and promote examples of the male ideal regarding female behavior? Like Colonna and Montalvo, profiles Mary’s knowledge, understanding, and skillful practice of female spirituality and indicates that Mary constitutes an attainable exemplar for women as one who demonstrates how and on what to meditate in order to get closer to God
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